China is now blocking all language editions of Wikipedia – OONI
What happened: The Tor Project’s Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), which monitors internet censorship around the world, has discovered that all language editions of Wikipedia have been blocked in China since around April 25. In a recent blog post, the software project detailed how measurements collected from China Telecom revealed that all Wikipedia domains have been blocked via DNS injection and SNI filtering, and that the block is targeting “any subdomain/language edition of wikipedia.org… but not any other Wikimedia resources, beyond zh.wikinews.org.”
Why it’s important: The Chinese language edition of Wikipedia has been blocked by China Telecom since November 2016, according to OONI. With this more recent block, China will join the likes of Turkey as one of the few countries currently exercising a full ban of the online encyclopedia. There are no signs indications that Wikipedia will become accessible again, and there has been no explanation so far as to why the block now extends to all languages. For now, Wikipedia will join the rest of China’s approximately 10,000 blocked domains.